Marie Walton, ABR, CRS, GRI, SRES

Today the Federal Housing finance Agency released their property on Dallas area housing prices. The report said that housing prices in the Dallas area were up by 0.08%. You could easily call that flat.

Yesterday Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller report, the darlings of the press, came out and it said that prices were down in March by 5.6%.

Information from the Texas A&M Real Estate Center showed that the average price of a single family home was down by 8% in March.

Well is it down by 8%, or by 5.6% or up by 0.08%? the truth is that all of these reports are right and wrong. how can that be? If you want a detailed explanation take a look at my blog of May 2.

The truth of the matter is that the real estate market is very localized and by that I mean by neighborhood. there are areas that are down a little, areas that are flat, and there are even some areas that are up.

Please do not use Zillow to get an idea of prices. They really do not know. This afternoon I got a phone call from a lady in another city in Texas. She was considering moving to Dallas and had been looking up properties on Zillow. The house she called about is listed for $287,900 but Zillow said it was worth $500,000 and she could not understand why I was offering it so cheap! I had to explain to her the many problems with Zillow and why their methodology does not work in Texas.

If you really want to know what is happening to prices in the neighborhood you live in or are interested in buying in, you need to talk to a Realtor that is very familiar with that area. Otherwise you are just guessing!

Sales continued be be soft in Plano. The Average Sales price was down by 13% and the Median Sales Price was off by 9%. Pending Sales were down by 29% which does not bode well for May. The number of New Listings and Active Listings declined helping to keep the number of Months of Inventory at a low level of 5.1 months.

Sales: 215

Average Sales Price: $258,939

Median Sales Price: $214,250

Pending Sales: 212

New Listings: 459

Active Listings: 1,301

Days on Market of Sales: 63

North Dallas north of Northwest Hwy. and South of LBJ.

April saw sales continue to be weak and both the Average and Median Sales Prices declined. To compound the problem there was a huge increase in the number of Active Listings sending the Months of Inventory to 19 months. This is a very large over supply.

Sales: 38

Average Price: $740,621

Median Price: $537,750

Pending Sales: 38

New Listings:174

Active Listings: 751

Days on Market: 86

North Dallas North of LBJ.

This area of North Dallas also experienced a continuation of declining Sales along with a decline in the Average and Median Sales Price. The number of New and Active listings declined creating a Months of Inventory number of 7 months. While this number is high, it's not as bad as some other areas of Dallas.

Sales: 69

Average Sales Price: $291,112

Median Sales Price: $252,750

Pending Sales: 59

New Listings: 166

Active Listings: 523

Days on Market: 62

In my blog of yesterday I stated that foreclosures were not impacting values in Richardson.

This morning I opened up the business section of the Dallas Morning News to find the headline FORECLOSURE SALES DRAG PRICES DOWN. The first paragraph of the article said" An increase in foreclosure sales helped pull down Dallas-Fort Worth home prices in the first quarter".

If you took the time to read the article your would find deep down on page 5 of the paper "Along with foreclosures, median home prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have been pushed lower because of a plunge in the sale of high-end homes."

An example of what they are talking about is:

In April of 2008 there were 3 sales in a City. One sold for $100,000, one for $200,000, and one for $300,000. The average sales price was $200,000. Now let's jump forward to April 2009. We had one house sell for $100,000 and one sell for $200,000. The April 2009 average sales price is $150,000. The average sale price dropped 25%. Did prices really drop or did we just not have a sale at the top end of the market?

Granted this is a very simple example, but it does serve to demonstrate how sometimes statistics can be deceiving and reminds me of a quotation I believe came from Mark Twain " There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics."

Too many people get caught up in the headlines, don't read the whole story, and think it's about the local market when the story is really talking about what is happening in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

Yes, if you are looking in the south part of Dallas County you will find some neighborhoods impacted by foreclosures but, in general, not in North Dallas, Richardson, or Plano. What is impacting sales is the belief by buyers that there is this great pool of foreclosures on the market and that homes that are not foreclosures should sell for greatly reduced prices.

Sales continue to be weak in Richardson. For the month of April there were 56 properties sold. This represents a 52% decline over last April's sales. The average sales price declined to $155,997, a 9% decrease, and the median sales price declined to $149,500, an 8% dropoff.

The number of pending contracts fell 29% to 72. The number of new listings fell 16% to 126. At the end of April there were 299 homes for sale. This represents a 21% decline.

Richardson only has a 3.9 months supply of homes for sale. This is an extreamly low number and if you are a Buyer you have very few homes to chose from.

I know the media says that the price decline is due to the high number of foreclosures on the market, but this is not the case in Richardson. The truth is there just are not that many foreclosures in Richardson. The foreclosures that do exist are scattered throughout the City and are not impacting any neighborhood values.